[FrustratedMonky]

Is there a Sutta for being behind on a project, and crushing stress at meeting deadlines, being critical path and a few dozen people waiting on you.

Seriously. There are a lot of Sutta's. Wondering if one deals with regular deadlines/stress.

[thoughtFrame]

The Bhagavad Gita is for you. Reducing stress is related to cultivating detachment(vairagya) while still doing your duty in the project.

I've seen this objection so many times that I'll say it first: detachment is not apathy, it's not "not caring about the project anymore".

[FrustratedMonky]

I'm not objecting.

Just in the heat of the moment, hard to stay detached.

Sometimes the Suttas, can be a bit 'distant' to everyday life. Hard to relate them back to the hear and now.

[thoughtFrame]

Yeah, practical hermeneutics involve a healthy sprinkle of our reality into those texts.

And it makes sense that modern problems aren't well treated by sutras or vedic texts. Deadlines are ever shortening, everything is vying for our attention. A project that we're very attached to because the failure of delivering means you could get sacked (usually, our minds jump straight to the worst case: we WILL get sacked) is probably something unheard of in the times of the Buddha. But it's just hard-mode life compared to what they wrote. The patterns are the same, but you have less HP, and you're full of debuffs. Under that lens, those texts are mostly timeless and independent of which era you read it on. If you understand that you're working on a team, that your agency is only one part of the success. There's all sort of factors that go into the success or failure of the project, and all you can do is the work you've been assigned to. That's where you can care and do the best work that you can while still being dispassionate about the project's success or failure, and thus less affected by the pressures of the deadlines, less stressed by the pressures from the higher ups, the estimates you know are completely wrong, etc.

Of course, all of this is assuming you're working on the kind of project I'm imagining, but it should apply to other things too

[nataliste]

There's always the Simile of the Mountain:

https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/SN/SN3_25.html